I suppose being born and growing through to adulthood is a bit of a Big Bang sort of experience.At first you don't remember anything,but as you get farther and farther from your point of origin,you see a few things flashing by you.You have no idea that ,at some time it may be useful to think back to those things,so that you might tell others of them at some point in time.They are isolated events when they happen.There is no sense of knowing what history is.As you grow,there are more and more things rushing by,and they become easier to discern and to understand You are not in any one place for more than a moment,though at the time,when you are a child things can seem to move very slowly.It seemed we were in Redmondville forever,but,as time goes it was really just a moment.For me though,a year was a third of my whole life,so it seemed a very long time.Not only a very long time,but a seeming eternity in which the view never changed very much.
And then we moved.It seemed very sudden and the world became very different overnight.One of the things that seemed very clear to me,throughout life,was that if I went very far from home,in any direction,is that things became very different.As a child ,when we traveled I had a sense of being in very foreign surroundings when I was only a few miles down the road.Whenever we traveled by car,getting anywhere seemed to take a very long time,but that was just a child's illusion.We lived on a busy road,with a lot of woods around and not much water.Just down the road,the whole world changed.There were army trucks and even planes at some of the places I went with my father.There were lighthouses and fishing boats and piles of lobster traps in other places we went.In those places it was often a bit cooler than it was where we lived and you would have to take a coat along.Sometimes,in some of the driveways,there were seashells instead of the gravel in our own driveway.And the people,not really so very far away,spoke differently,in a language I did not understand.We were not native to the region where we lived,and so,I did not know that there were French Acadians living all around us,as we spoke English,and my parents had friends who likewise spoke English.I had no sense,at the time of there being any more than one language.
Moncton,though had plenty of people who spoke French.Nearly as many as those who spoke English.And so,I came to meet and know both kinds of people as soon as we moved.My world was expanding and I was gaining a sense of our tongues being confounded that would follow me throughout my life,up until I moved to Toronto,where you can hear a babel of many different tongues while out for a short walk or train ride.That's the thing about being Canadian.It is all about encountering a huge plurality of cultural realities in a country that is so very large.Sometimes those realities are only revealed over the vastness of area that our country takes in,and,over the passing of decades.But,sometimes it's true,that things change a great deal only a few miles from home.
Moncton was,by the standard of the day,a medium sized industrial city,located nearly in the center of the four Atlantic Provinces.It was about eighty miles from where my father worked,and from where we had lived up until some time in 1964.The city of Moncton was,in those days all about trains.There was a switching yard out in the east end,and a huge locomotive repair shop in the heart of town.You could hear trains off in the distance most of the time as they shuttled cars into the shops for repairs,or,as they hitched cars together.You could hear the whistle at the shops,throughout town I suppose,but certainly at our house.Always there was a sense and a sound of trains moving,always you could feel them move beneath your feet.The repair shops were the largest buildings I had ever seen and they looked dark and dirty,but also fascinating,to a child who had never seen trains before.You could never escape the reality of trains here.Many of our neighbors worked at the train repair shops,including our next door neighbor.
I've said that things are often very different when you travel just a short distance.I suppose that living in Moncton was a great way to gain an appreciation of that fact,as demographics seem to make that a larger truth there than,perhaps in many other places.If you can imagine the province of New Brunswick as being a square,then divide it geographically in a diagonal from Northwest to Southeast,what you find is that the Northeast part of the province is largely French,Acadian and Catholic.The Southwest is home to English speaking peoples,Irish,Scots,and the like,many of them United Empire Loyalists.Moncton,of course lies exactly on that dividing line.In fact,Moncton seems to be more French in it's eastern extremities and more English to the west.So.you can travel only a short distance away to the Northeast and find villages where everyone speaks French,and,a short distance to the Southwest where no one speaks a word of French.So.on the one hand, with Moncton lying where it does,there have always seemed to be tensions.On the other hand,it also seems to be a place where such tensions tend to be accommodated,and even resolved.
And that the cultural setting of our new home.For my father,who would have just turned thirty,it was time to find a place to settle down.For myself,it wasn't my first home,or for that matter even my second,but it was the place where most of my growing into adulthood took place.Once my father bought our home there,he never left.There came a time when I couldn't wait to leave,but that was a few years off.
And then we moved.It seemed very sudden and the world became very different overnight.One of the things that seemed very clear to me,throughout life,was that if I went very far from home,in any direction,is that things became very different.As a child ,when we traveled I had a sense of being in very foreign surroundings when I was only a few miles down the road.Whenever we traveled by car,getting anywhere seemed to take a very long time,but that was just a child's illusion.We lived on a busy road,with a lot of woods around and not much water.Just down the road,the whole world changed.There were army trucks and even planes at some of the places I went with my father.There were lighthouses and fishing boats and piles of lobster traps in other places we went.In those places it was often a bit cooler than it was where we lived and you would have to take a coat along.Sometimes,in some of the driveways,there were seashells instead of the gravel in our own driveway.And the people,not really so very far away,spoke differently,in a language I did not understand.We were not native to the region where we lived,and so,I did not know that there were French Acadians living all around us,as we spoke English,and my parents had friends who likewise spoke English.I had no sense,at the time of there being any more than one language.
Moncton,though had plenty of people who spoke French.Nearly as many as those who spoke English.And so,I came to meet and know both kinds of people as soon as we moved.My world was expanding and I was gaining a sense of our tongues being confounded that would follow me throughout my life,up until I moved to Toronto,where you can hear a babel of many different tongues while out for a short walk or train ride.That's the thing about being Canadian.It is all about encountering a huge plurality of cultural realities in a country that is so very large.Sometimes those realities are only revealed over the vastness of area that our country takes in,and,over the passing of decades.But,sometimes it's true,that things change a great deal only a few miles from home.
Moncton was,by the standard of the day,a medium sized industrial city,located nearly in the center of the four Atlantic Provinces.It was about eighty miles from where my father worked,and from where we had lived up until some time in 1964.The city of Moncton was,in those days all about trains.There was a switching yard out in the east end,and a huge locomotive repair shop in the heart of town.You could hear trains off in the distance most of the time as they shuttled cars into the shops for repairs,or,as they hitched cars together.You could hear the whistle at the shops,throughout town I suppose,but certainly at our house.Always there was a sense and a sound of trains moving,always you could feel them move beneath your feet.The repair shops were the largest buildings I had ever seen and they looked dark and dirty,but also fascinating,to a child who had never seen trains before.You could never escape the reality of trains here.Many of our neighbors worked at the train repair shops,including our next door neighbor.
I've said that things are often very different when you travel just a short distance.I suppose that living in Moncton was a great way to gain an appreciation of that fact,as demographics seem to make that a larger truth there than,perhaps in many other places.If you can imagine the province of New Brunswick as being a square,then divide it geographically in a diagonal from Northwest to Southeast,what you find is that the Northeast part of the province is largely French,Acadian and Catholic.The Southwest is home to English speaking peoples,Irish,Scots,and the like,many of them United Empire Loyalists.Moncton,of course lies exactly on that dividing line.In fact,Moncton seems to be more French in it's eastern extremities and more English to the west.So.you can travel only a short distance away to the Northeast and find villages where everyone speaks French,and,a short distance to the Southwest where no one speaks a word of French.So.on the one hand, with Moncton lying where it does,there have always seemed to be tensions.On the other hand,it also seems to be a place where such tensions tend to be accommodated,and even resolved.
And that the cultural setting of our new home.For my father,who would have just turned thirty,it was time to find a place to settle down.For myself,it wasn't my first home,or for that matter even my second,but it was the place where most of my growing into adulthood took place.Once my father bought our home there,he never left.There came a time when I couldn't wait to leave,but that was a few years off.
Hey Bro, I read your last entry and would comment if I could, but I remember nothing of those days....after moving to Moncton I may have one early memory, but it also may have been a sensation I think I remember from a pic in those slides we used to watch on the Davis Home(sheet on the wall)Theatre.......
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